Gender in Norwegian nouns

This page relates to the application A Norwegian Grammar Sparrer, see A Norwegian Grammar Sparrer.

Common nouns in Norwegian belong to a gender: ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ or ‘neuter’. (In some versions of Norwegian there are only two options, the marking of feminine having disappeared or nearly disappeared. In these versions, one sometimes refers to the remaining non-neuter gender as ‘common gender’. Here we will assume the three-gender system.) The gender of a noun reveals itself in the form of the inflections for number and definiteness; typical forms of the suffixes are as indicated below:

noun suffixes sorted by definiteness, number and gender

feature	masculine	feminine	neuter
indefinite plural	er	er	Ø (zero)
definite singular	en	a	et
definite plural	ene	ene	ene or a

The gender also can show itself in agreement. See . Agreement in Norwegian noun phrases